Amid criticisms that it has failed to innovate, Apple is increasingly taking marketing into its own hands. It's madly building an internal agency that it's telling recruits will eventually number 1,000 -- the size of Grey Advertising. It's pitting TBWA/MAL against this internal agency with "jump balls" to mine the best creative ideas, a controversial tactic with outside agencies, let alone an internal one. It's going after some of adland's boldest-faced names to staff its in-house shop -- in some cases, it's even poached executives from TBWA/MAL. And, in what once would have been seen as a sacrilegious breach of the Apple-MAL bond, it's been inviting some of the ad industry's top shops to pitch on major projects.

Details of Apple's plans to expand its internal ad team comes hot on the heels of a similar report from Bloomberg which last week claimed that Apple is aiming to produce a greater number of its TV commercials in-house.

As we've noted previously, Apple's dissatisfaction with the state of its advertising efforts was first made public during Apple and Samsung's second California trial when emails from Phil Schiller to Tim Cook. Schiller was primarily concerned that Apple's iPhone commercials seemed stale compared to some of the biting adverts Samsung was putting out.

Apple, the report adds, has recently been reaching out to some of the top ad agencies in the country, hoping to poach as many talented creatives as it can. Interestingly, AdAge adds that Apple has encountered some resistance from some of its recruits, in part due to the high living costs in Cupertino.

Lest anyone doubt Apple's ability to come up with creative ideas in-house, it's worth noting that some of the commercials already created by Apple's internal advertising team include the iPhone 5c "Greetings" ad and the brilliantly executed "Your Verse" iPad ad featuring a Robin Williams narration from the movie Dead Poets Society.